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Thank you Miriam.  We have switched from one brand to another (EasyStreet to Highgarden) in a couple of our markets.  We implemented a 301 redirect strategy for those sites and saw very little effect on our organic traffic. Thanks again for your input.

Thanks, Great response and information, i am comfortable now knowing that i do not need to bother with these tags, Thanks James

This does happen. Did any of your competitors also shuffle at that time? As long as you aren't doing anything wrong then it should be ok. You might want to look at your internal linking and links pointing to both pages that makes Google think that that page is more relevant. You could focus a little bit more on the page you want. It should return soon. Ive experienced this before about 8 times this year already. The good page always comes back.

If you search for "megeve property for sale", Google serves our META description as the snippet: Ski chalets, homes and apartments for sale in this exclusive, prestigious Rhone Alpes village - 520000-16500000 EUR. Looking at the relationship of the location, and the word sales. Means a user wants to buy, and your description contains that phrase. However, we noticed that searching for just "megeve property" serves up a much better snippet taken from the text on the page: A crucial factor for potential property buyers is that there is a strong rental market in Megève and this remains high all year around with properties close to the ... User is looking for general info on the subject, and your on page does the job well. Almost sounds like a magazine article. It sounded like you were asking for an exact answer. There you go. Google is most likely looking at the relationship between the words, and trying to serve the best result to interest a user aka Hummingbird in action

Sure, best example would be https://onlinempa.unc.edu/student-life/careers-in-public-administration/ Sample queries: public administration jobs mpa jobs careers in public administration uOnFjNt

Looking at OSE, I disagree there there are no spammy links.  Did you see all of those EDU comment links?

Looks like you answered your own question. I would hesitate about changing existing URLs and make the update for future posts. If that's not possible, you must have 301 redirects working properly. Also, if your targeting Broadway Theater, you need to make sure that keyword exists on the page content and try to change the breadcrumb to read Broadway instead of New York.

The independent agency used a second site to build its rank - it was just a website with a bunch of big picture links to their website and a ton of textual links below. The website since then has been redeveloped and we implemented all of the 301 redirects, etc. to ensure no page rank would be lost, so there isn't any bad links from their website. The links in OpenSiteExplorer also seem to be legit. Still haven't figured out why they are ranking so poorly tho, it was put aside for now. All of the help has been greatly appreciated.

After the update on the 20th, we have seen similar results on certain keywords. Big item here: DONT FREAK OUT. The last think you want to do is start changing a bunch of items on your site, and possibly get them both removed. If you wanted to take some kind of action, you could start looking at ways to help the page you want to rank. (Personally, I think its best if you can get them both to rank on page one, as it seems like Google likes both pages.) Start to add a few links to whatever page you want showing up, both internally, and through different blog or media elements. What you want to try and do is tell Google "This is the more important page". These kinds of things are common around when Google releases an update. Sometimes things look goofy for a few months while they actually get it applied. I don't think (my theory, not proven) that Google releases its algo update all at one time, hence why they say the are "rolling out" a new update when they release it. I think it is "rolled out" over a period of time, and that could be why you are seeing such results.

Basic cleanup From a procedural standpoint, you want to first add the noindex meta tag to the search results first.  Google has to see that tag to then act on it and remove the URLs.  You can also enter some of the URLs into the Webmaster tools removal tool. Next you would want to add /catalogsearch/ to robots.txt once you see all the pages getting out of the index. Advanced cleanup If any of these search result URLs are ranking and are landing pages in Google.  You may want to consider 301 redirecting those pages to the properly related category pages. My 2 cents.  I only use the GWT parameter handler on parameters that I have to show to the search engines. I otherwise try to hide all those URLs from Google to help with crawl efficiency. Note that it is really important that you do the work to find what pages/urls Google has cataloged to make sure you dont delete a page that is actually generating some traffic for you.  A landing page report from GA would help with this. Cheers!

Yup, that's where I'm at right now.  Got an email reply from G stating to wait up to 7 days for whoever has control to contact us.   At that point, I'll contact G directly.  Thanks!

Hi BBuck, I think I understand what you're saying, and there are 2 separate issues that I see you've brought up First, while there's nothing necessarily wrong with distributing navigation the way you've described, I find from a UX (user experience) standpoint that this is best avoided. Aside from that, I'm unaware of any reason it would be a bad practice. As for the URL issue you mention in the second paragraph, that can be taken care of with 301 redirects / rewrites. Basically, take this example: I have a page that's www.example.com/familiar/general/specific, but I don't want such a long URL. Using 301 redirects and rewrites, I would have the page stay the same, but the end of the URL could be whatever I want, like www.example.com/specific. If you're unfamiliar with how that works, I suggest either hiring a developer to do it (which would take a few seconds per page), or finding a quick tutorial if you have access to your website's back-end. I hope that helps you!

The basic theory is that as you go down a website's hierarchy, the more you go from short-tail, general themes to long-tail, specific things. Here's the rough idea: Home Page -- very general short-tail Blog (or other main section page) -- general and short-tail Post Category (or a section subpage) -- specific and long-tail Blog Post -- very specific and long-tail Basically, items like blog posts should ideally be the best sources of authoritative information on very specific topics such as a post each on "international seo," "e-commerce seo," and "b2b seo." All of these posts could be within a category of "seo strategy" for which the category page would aim to rank. As far as click-through rate -- it depends on the keyword. You should aim to give whatever will address the user intent behind a given search query. The more that the query is very, very specific, the more that it should probably be targeted by a specific post. The more that it is a general, informational query, the more that users may want to be taken to a collection of posts. Now, I wouldn't know what to suggest for your website because I have not seen it. But I hope this helps!

Hi David, I hope you had a good weekend? Thank you for all your help! I reported them to Google using the link you posted and already the other site's URLs that had copied us have been removed and our pages have been put back in the index. I have to say I am absolutely astounded that Google responded so quickly! Yes, that is us on Google + and my personal Google + is here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AmeliaVargo/posts/. Thank you again for your help thus far, and for your kind offer of more help should we need it! Have a great day, Amelia

Looks good to me as well, just as a tip. Don't forget to submit the parameters you're using in Google Webmaster Tools. In the menu item: URL Parameters are you able to configure if content changes with a certain parameter. It helps Google to understand your URL structure better.

Jane, do you recommend that we do a brand new study like Aviva did? It seems like that would make for a much higher quality article. If so, what's the minimum sample size and are there companies you know of that we can hire to do the study? Thanks! Great ideas here.

Are you absolutely sure that those links are what caused your rankings to drop?  When did the drop happen?  There was a big Panda update around May 20 that caused a lot of sites to increase or decrease in rankings and that is all about on-page content as opposed to links. Google is generally very good at simply discounting the links that come with negative SEO.  One of my own sites was hacked recently and had thousands of links pointing to it with anchors like "ugg boots" and "michael kors".  Those links showed up in ahrefs and majestic but not in Webmaster Tools.  The links did not affect my rankings.  I am pretty sure that the reason why they didn't appear in GWT is because Google was able to recognize it as an attack and just discount them.  Still, just to be sure I collected the links from ahrefs and majestic and disavowed them. I have still yet to see a credible case of negative SEO working on a site unless that site already had a really unnatural link profile to start with.

Yep. They definitely need static content on the home page.

That's all you need to do, is remove it via dns

Same here, I get the German version as well as I probably should get the Dutch/ NL pages.